Maintenance and Plant Engineering

To keep up your good health, you would visit your family doctor commonly and shall try to follow his suggestion or directions. When you ail by some problem, you approach a doctor to recover your health. The Plant Engineering & Management is as same activity as that of doctor if you suppose your body as a machine. Assume a situation that a refrigerator or a television in your house fails to work. You would instantly call a repairman and get it rectified. Such kind of activity of repairman in an organisation becomes the activity of maintenance or plant engineering.

In several small organisations, the plant engineering activities are completed by the production personnel, whereas in few other this is carried out by an external agency or call any suitable outside parties as and while needed like in the case of repair of your refrigerator or TV, etc. However in medium to big industries this is neither so easy nor economical to call or contract the services of outside parties. Instead it becomes too hard sometimes because of non-availability of repairmen in the required time or too much of dependability.

The function of maintenance is not just repairing the equipment while it fails, but it more concerned in preventing it from failing. Furthermore, the maintenance has to discover the ways & means to increase the useful and productive life of the equipment. Though, the outside parties might not do any justice to these two activities. Thus most firms frequently go for maintaining a separate department of maintenance or plant engineering to look after the act of increasing the life or effective & efficient usage of machinery and equipment.